This comes close to genius. Or borderline obsessive compulsion: Cory Arcangel's re-creation of Arnold Schoenberg's Three Piano Pieces, op. 11, edited from YouTube's sub-culture of piano-playing cats. All 170 of them.

Cory spent "a few months of free time" making these videos, with the help of a software program called Comparisonics, that allows you to search for similar sounds in audio files, using Glenn Gould's recording of the Schoenberg as his litmus test to compare with YouTube's cats. And the result is one of the great victories of transcendent, purposeful purposelessness on the internet.

Cory's labours must have been heroic, sifting through hours of audio to find sounds that approached each note and chord of the Schoenberg (as closely as possible) from the piano-playing cats. You begin watching and listening by laughing at the literal minded-brilliance of a project that proves that any old cat can compose like Schoenberg. But as you keep watching, the sheer scale of Cory's achievement in recreating all 15 minutes of Schoenberg's pieces (and Gould's recording) goes beyond the risible. It's a minor miracle of postmodern combinatoriality, proving beyond doubt that composition, or performance, isn't just about creating new sounds, but about how you put existing sounds together. And, maybe for the first time, it plugs Schoenberg into the popular technological vernacular. Yes, I'd rather have the Gould than the felines as a performance of the Schoenberg, but Cory's cats have a unique, chaotic poetry.